FRENCH,
Paul, Midnight in Peking, Penguin
Group (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Camberwell Vic., 2012.
Reprint: octavo; paperback,
with colour endpaper maps; 278pp., with 16pp. of monochrome and full-colour
plates. Minor wear; text block bent. Very good to near fine.
When I started this blog (seems
like ages ago now) one of my aims was to highlight the notion of the Cthulhu
Mythos in China, something which seemed to me to have been studiously ignored
by the roleplaying and literary agencies out there, regardless of the fact that
China crops up as a reference in every other Lovecraft work, or in those of his
circles. In starting my research, I was blown away by the book Shanghai – History of a Decadent City by
Stella Dong, because it covered material of such outstanding ferocity that even
the worst writer on the planet couldn’t help but produce a work which would
make the reader sit up and take notice (I’m not saying that Dong is a poor
writer; far from it – she’s a great writer and a better historian. However I
suspect that, given the material, any attempt at literary fireworks would
simply have fallen by the wayside in the face of the gob-smacking revelations
which she was imparting, so she just rolled it all out, without the frills).
Given the sheer scale of corruption and decadence that was China at the
beginning of the Twentieth Century, I couldn’t think of a better place for
Keepers to think about setting up their Call
of Cthulhu campaigns and so I began this blog to start people thinking in
that direction. Many years later, I followed a few scraps of information which
led me to the awareness of this
particular book. Serendipitously, it showed up at a bookshop which I was
volunteering to help set up and I claimed it as the reward for my assistance.
That was a day ago – I literally could not put it down once I had cracked the
covers.
If Republican China is a place
where it’s possible to populate the landscape with Lovecraftian horrors, it’s
because it’s a place that was already teeming with monsters. Not the scabrous,
squamous, tentacled abominations of HPL’s imagination, but monsters nonetheless;
corrupt and soulless, walking the world in suits of human flesh. This book
drags them out into the light of day.
The matter of this work is the
murder of a young British woman of White Russian descent and the dumping of her
body outside the walls of the Chinese (at that time) former capital. Deaths
were a dime a dozen at this time, in that place, but it was her connexions
which gave this crime precedence: she was the adopted daughter of E.T.C.
Werner, a former diplomat and renowned sinologist, with certain beneficial
links to the nascent Chinese government, the Kuomintang. Pamela Werner had gone
ice-skating in the Foreign Legation section of the city – that portion which
was besieged during the Boxer Rebellion almost forty years previously – and had
vanished. The next morning she was found beside a defunct moat outside the old
city walls, near an old watchtower of haunted reputation, and so mangled as to
be almost unidentifiable. She had been brutally bashed and stabbed repeatedly all
over her head and torso; she had been cut open from her neck to her pubis and
her ribs had been broken, snapped outwards, the sternum ripped away; her
heart, liver, bladder and one kidney had been removed and her stomach, although
in situ, had been disconnected at the
base of her oesophagus and the top of her small intestine. She was only
identified by the distinctive colour of what remained of one eye and a platinum
watch which she was wearing on an arm which someone had tried to hack off. What
followed was a tortuous police investigation, hampered by a maze of diplomatic
stonewalling, jurisdictional arguments, political game-playing, corruption and
sheer ineptitude.
Paul French, a writer living
and working in China, conjures the seedy and wicked depravity of Republican era
Peking, detailing unflinchingly the sordid nature of the back-alley bars, opium
dens and whorehouses, sheltering cheek-by-jowl with the high-class hotels and
international clubs. This bizarre juxtaposing of the expensive and sumptuous
with the tawdry and dissolute is the hallmark of China at this time and French
brings it glowingly to life. As well, he deftly sketches the main players in
the investigation – Colonel Han Shih-ching, the local police detective
representing the Chinese authorities; DCI Richard Dennis, dragged-in from
Tientsin to assist Colonel Han and to act as an intermediary with the police forces
of the International Legations, led by Commissioner Thomas; and the dead girl’s
father E.T.C Werner. As well as a veritable rogue’s gallery of shifty
diplomats, shady underworld types and conniving thugs, French conjures the
despicable world of 1937 Peking, where anything and anyone are up for grabs in
the name of sick entertainment – even a 19-year-old school girl. With the
looming presence of the Japanese army encircling the city in a grip of steel,
French paints a sordid world of frenzied hedonism whirling faster as the inevitable
hammer-blow approaches.
Shocking as the details of
Pamela’s desecration are, even more shocking is the willingness of the
International authorities, the incumbent Chinese legal apparatus and even the
invading Japanese overlords to turn their backs on the crime and bury it in red
tape and obfuscation. In the end, it is only the girl’s father, spending his
entire personal fortune, who gets to the bottom of the story, after detectives
and policemen have been ordered away, sent home, or killed off. In the
interests of “saving face” everyone abandons Pamela and any notion of justice
for her murder. In fact, French reveals that he found Werner’s self-compiled investigation
report in a box in London labelled “Miscellaneous Correspondence” where it had
been buried by the British Government and successfully ignored for over eighty
years. It contained all the pieces of the puzzle and all the answers.
The sheer travesty of humanity
and governance revealed by this incident is bewildering. These individuals, supposedly
representing the apex of decency and civilisation, bend over backwards to
distance themselves from the crime, which exposes them to ridicule and censure;
in their own way, they are no more human than the monsters in human skin-suits who
perpetrated the act. French leads us through the whole series of events slowly
stripping away layers of deceit and corruption until we are left with what can
only – in retrospect – have been the outcome desired by all parties involved: a swift sweeping
under the carpet of an ugly episode followed by a return of the status quo.
Yes, there is no justice at the
end of this book. We know, ultimately, what happened to Pamela and French sifts
the clues to provide clear probability where the chain of evidence falls thin.
No-one walks away with clean hands here; everyone is tainted by guilt and
complicity. In fact, E.T.C. Werner, at first presented to us as an insufferable
academic thwarting any attempt at empathy due to his intellectual rigor, is
revealed as the only person in the story largely free from blame. That French is able
to squarely point his finger to where culpability lies is only due to Werner’s
painstaking search to find his daughter’s killer, a quest that consumed the
last years of his life.
Paul French has crafted a
horrifying true tale of murder and international cupidity. It deftly catches
the wildest heights of Republican China with Japanese agents provocateurs lurking in the shadows, destitute White Russians
dying in the alleys, canny rickshaw drivers selling information, a Korean hermaphrodite trading underworld secrets, and
even a clandestine nudist colony established by the British in the mountains west of the city. Every time I dive into this murky barrel of
base humanity, I find myself shocked by some new revelation and French serves
it up palpable and steaming.
Four-and-a-half Tentacled
Horrors.
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